Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 23

Why Teach Literature

First of all, let’s not accept the current definition of “literature.”

Mostly because it makes no sense. If you dig into “literature” as opposed to “genre” what you get is two non-falsifiable statements: “Literature is bigger/deeper/more important than genre.” and “Literature is what literature professors anoint as literature.”

In both cases, if you try to pursue it, you are met with stompy feet and “because we said so.” Now it’s stompy feet and “because we said so” dressed in a lot of...

Adrift In the Stratosphere — Reading the Past

I actually have a follow up post to Charlie’s post yesterday, but it will wait till tomorrow, because by gum, Wednesdays are for fighting for a retrospective of my roots in science fiction.

Which since my essay for tomorrow is about why even suggest books for someone to read or do analysis and review at all, is one of the answers in advance: we can learn a lot of the history of a genre (or literature, or the time) from a few select books, in more or less chronological order.

I have to ...

Ludic Reading and the Gatsby Wars of 25 by Charlie Martin

Ludic Reading and the Gatsby Wars of 25 by Charlie Martin

So, some dispatches from the Great Gatsby War. This is really another border skirmish between people who read what they’re told, and people who read for pleasure. I’m going to suggest that the “read what you’re told” people and the “read for pleasure” are missing an essential point, and that is that you have to learn to read for pleasure too. The core issue here is that the “read what you’re told” people don’t understand that, or j...

Not Storming The Bastille

No, I’m not calling for a French Revolution. As I had to tell an editor at one point — he didn’t take it well, btw — there is a reason I didn’t have my character lead the future French-Revolution analog in the Darkship series. Because the d*mn thing was a proto-communist attack on civilization, as any attempt to impose equality on human society always is. The only equality we should have is equality under the law. Other than that, the only way humans can be made equal is to kill them all. ...

Meme-ed Not Stirred

Every week t...

Coming To Ourselves

Coming to oneself means regaining consciousness. I don’t recall ever hearing it used in English, (though the expression is the same) but in Portuguese “vir-se a si” is the expression explicitly used to denote waking from a swoon. (We tend to just say waking. Which I didn’t want to use because of the aggregation to woke which, like all leftist speak means the opposite of the plain meaning of the word.)

I was contemplating this post when in a group a friend linked this post: American Stron...

Not Of Bread Alone

Not of bread alone lives man…. I seem to remember someone saying that. Yes, the follow up was about religion, but the point remains. “Not of bread alone lives man.”

It’s weirdly easier to ignore that in our super-affluent era. You’d think that people scrabbling to survive in a world that yielded subsistence a handful of grain and a quarter cup of oil at a time would be more focused on the material, the absolutely needed to keep alive. But no. People in those circumstances were aware of t...

The Beatings Will Continue Till The Culture Improves!

I’m tired.

I mean, okay, part of the reason I’m tired is that my thyroid is still not quite right, and I’m trying to get the full house unpacked by the end of the month. And I’m trying to edit the YUGE book, and… and never sufficiently d*mned daylight savings time has thrown a spanner in my physical works just at this time.

But the other part of why I’m tired is more of a Weltschmerz, a weariness of the soul.

It got triggered yesterday by some poor sod on Twittex. I’m told he is an ...

The Future of the Past

Three months ago I came up with resuming a project I started here before the great lockdowns and all the insanity.

I was going to read myself back into my personal history with science fiction.

I see this is going to take my explaining a bit of my own background or how I came to run away with the science fiction and fantasy circus, which is not just a fairly strange pursuit for a woman who was born and raised in a small Portuguese village of no particular importance but outright insane...

The Big Tent

So, here we are, somehow part of a big tent.

Okay, correction, the big tent is still forming. We have the oddest people suddenly trying to be with us or on our side, or something. And it’s not so much like we’ve done something to attract everyone and their second cousin, it’s that the other side has been so enthusiastically pushing people away and excommunicating people and demanding that people conform to not just a narrow but ever changing set of specifications that change constantly....